Fighting fraud at financial technology companies

Oh no!

In the past 30 days, we’ve had our first experience with a fraudulent application. Fortunately, we were able to catch the instance before proceeding with making an investment!

How do we establish trust without coffee?

That said, it heightened our awareness to the need for even more fraud prevention in our investment process.  In the next 30 days, we will be developing a fraud process and procedure document and will be taking a number of steps to protect ourselves.  It’s an unfortunate reality — and dealing with this issue proactively and aggressively is super important for us given the nature of our business. What I mean by that, is that because we’re moving to becoming a web-based investor our ability to rely on in-person coffee meetings to establish “trust” is significantly reduced and thus, the need for fraud prevention is even greater.

We’re allergic to fraud.

Having fraud at this stage in our company’s life would be like having cancer — it would scare investors away from all the cool things we’re doing.  Moreover, it would undermine our portfolio and confidence in making investments going forward.